~ Perspective from Vancouver

Good, Bad and Mostly Ugly: Cycling in NYC fifteen years ago

Back in January 2002, Clarence Eckerson (now of Streetfilms) recorded his commute and what it was like to ride in Brooklyn and Manhattan on the very best existing – but mostly troubled – bike lanes in NYC. Highlight timing here.

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This is a great post – testimony to how far we’ve come combating the brutal, bullying, violent car culture. Hate those mofo Fedex jackasses that park everywhere. Hate those jackasses that stop on bike lanes to let passengers out forcing you around them. Hate those jackasses that drop passengers at the No Stopping signs at transit stops.

What’s clear, is that nice doesn’t work. What works are bollards and curbs. What works is parked car protected bike lanes.

I’m one of the very few that routinely cycles the length of the motordom nightmare of Kingsway. It’s no mystery why cyclists avoid it – it’s terrifying. Which is a real shame because it’s the only lengthy diagonal in the city. Everything else is subject to the relentless grid that was imposed by people working in offices that didn’t take into account Vancouver’s wild topography.

If any street should have a bike line, it’s Kingsway – not a sharrows; not a painted line, but a parked car protected lane. One lane on each side needs to be reconfigured. Kingsway would become one of the most highly used bike routes.

Bike lanes on Kingsway have been on the plans since the 1999 Transportation Plan. Since then our cycling hostile planning dept and successive city councils have consistently made Kingsway worse for cycling. Such a shame.

Note that when I first moved here in 1974, I rode from New West to VGH and got there in about 40 min by bike. (It was 30 min by car). Now I rarely ride on Kingsway because it is just too crazy.

This was my experience with bike “infrastructure” in the Bronx at the same time. Fifteen years later, Mr. Eckerson’s same route is a comparative dream. And all it took was some damn leadership. There is hope…

When the clock strikes three – it’s like they’ve unleashed the Hounds of Hell on the streets – marauding commuter Mongols making time, trying to catch lights, jockeying for position. It’s urban terror. People who don’t live in the area terrorizing those who do.

It would be useful to interview these elbows-out slitty-eyed maniacs. Where do they live? Where are they going? There was one in a BMW M the other day along Kingsway that was frightening – music blaring; mindless jack-rabbiting. Sometimes beating me to the lights as I’d catch up on my bicycle. We played leapfrog. My ecological and economic expense – too small to measure. His trip was expensive. As Bugs Bunny would say: What a moroon.

I’m not sanguine about changes coming anytime soon; but at least the idea of it is not so easily dismissed. Look at how the motorists whined in Paris about losing their idiotic territorial claim to the Left Bank. Now it looks like the Right Bank is also going the right way – to pedestrians and cyclists. Civility, not motordom.